Will Hurd

Congressman says border security and cybersecurity go hand in hand

Interview By Kathleen Petty

Illustration By Ryan Inzana

If Congressman Will Hurd isn’t in Washington, D.C., he’s likely on the road. The San Antonio native who was elected in a tight race in 2014 serves a district that includes 29 counties, two time zones and over 800 miles of borderland. While that means the issues his constituents most care about can vary from cybersecurity to telemedicine to cattle health, he says everyone is concerned about core problems like national security and trade between Mexico and the U.S. “I enjoy the travel,” says Hurd, who has generated press this year for being one of the most outspoken Republicans against President Donald Trump’s border wall plan. “I’ve got super urban San Antonio and then Loving County, which is the second least populated county in the United States.”

You don’t support building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico. What is the right approach to border security?

Building a wall from sea to shining sea is the most expensive and least effective way to do it, but border security is important. We should be using technology. I’ve proposed legislation that would create a “smart wall.” The sensor technology that exists in 2017 can determine the difference between a rabbit and a person. You could deploy a drone to see what that threat is and confirm if it’s a threat and then you could track that threat until you’re able to deploy your most important resource: human capital, men and women in border patrol. Seventy-five percent of that process I just described can be done with computer vision, artificial intelligence and machineware that we already have. So you become more effective at protecting every mile of our border for a fraction of the cost of building a 30-foot-high concrete monstrosity. That’s where we should be focusing. We should also be increasing the amount of intelligence we’re collecting on the 19 criminal organizations south of the border. We should also continue to make sure we have more men and women in border patrol. We passed several pieces of legislation this year to make it easier for men and women in the military to transition into border patrol and we passed a supplemental appropriation for Homeland Security that provides more technology and more manpower. So we’re trying to talk about this as much as possible—that we should be talking about a virtual wall. Not a physical wall.

Does the fact that the issue is politicized make it tougher to address?

I don’t think it’s ever not been politicized. When the Secure Fence Act of 2006 was passed, there were all kinds of legal battles because the federal government came in and used eminent domain. I’ve told my colleagues that Texans are pretty partial to private property rights. In a hyperpartisan environment, it’s often hard to have real conversations about solutions, but I try to leverage my background to focus on results-oriented solutions. Yes, Washington, D.C., is a circus and it’s partisan. But there’s actually a lot of work across the aisle getting done. My district includes 820 miles of the border—more than any other congressman. A lot of people talk about the border and they’ve never been to the border. Every mile of the border is different so part of my job is educating my colleagues on the realities of the border.

Does your background in the CIA and cybersecurity inform your daily work in other ways?

It 100 percent informs how I work every day. When I left Texas A&M, I went straight into the CIA at 22. I was in Washington, D.C., two years, India two years, Pakistan two years, New York two years and then Afghanistan for a year and a half. So when we talk about issues of the day, Afghanistan is still a problem 16 years later. When lawmakers talk about how to deal with a nuclear regime like North Korea, (my opinions) are informed by my time in Pakistan and dealing with the issue of nuclear weapons on the Indian subcontinent. And then when we talk about ISIS, working with and against Al Qaeda—there’s some lessons I learned there that are applicable. I ran for Congress in 2010 and I lost, but I had the opportunity to be a partner in a consulting firm at a cybersecurity company. Understanding the threats that our clients were faced with every single day and understanding what good digital hygiene looks like in those companies, those are all things that have allowed me to work on those topics in Congress.

How is the government’s digital hygiene compare with that of your clients?

Some are good. Most are bad. Let’s just take one simple thing. I chair a subcommittee on information technology. We do the FITARA (Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act ) scorecard. This was a piece of legislation that passed a couple of years ago. It looks at things like closing down data centers and transitioning to the cloud, making sure you’re doing IT projects that have deliverables every six months, things like this. One area we’re going to add when we do the next grade is software licenses. Only two out of every 24 CFO agencies—those are the big government agencies—would have had a passing grade on knowing how many licenses they have. One, if you don’t know the software that’s on your network, you’re creating vulnerabilities. Two, you’re probably paying for licenses you don’t need, which is a gross misuse of taxpayer dollars. In the private sector, you would never find a company that doesn’t know what software is on their network. The technical solutions to these things are quite easy. These are leadership problems. It’s not having leadership at the top of the agency, or sometimes not having the right chief information officer in place. When it comes to the 24th and 25th Air Force in San Antonio, they know. They’re on the cutting edge when it comes to cybersecurity.

Does that mean cybersecurity in San Antonio will continue to grow?

It will continue to grow here because of the 24th and 25th Air Force and NSA Texas. We have more cybersecurity professionals in San Antonio than anywhere in the country outside the national Capitol region—from Fort Meade where the NSA is to Langley where the CIA is to Arlington where the Pentagon is up to D.C. And we have universities like UTSA and Texas A&M-San Antonio that are focusing on this and producing the skilled workforce that will take on some of these jobs. One of the things I’m most excited about is that the Air Force here, when they don’t have an answer to a problem, reaches out to the private sector to get something done. That’s how we ultimately build an ecosystem of businesses and companies around cybersecurity. Plus, when you look at Austin, the founders of two of the first big companies that started there [National Instruments and Dell] have stayed and continued to invest. We’re seeing Graham Weston and the other Rackspace executives here do that same thing.